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Week 4: Analyze and Adjust the Campaign
Week 4: Analyze and Adjust the Campaign
Friday: Educate Stakeholders on the Process
stakeholders likely cannot, and should not, understand the idiosyncrasies of running
and optimizing a campaign. that’s your job, right? but this is a good opportunity to
educate your colleagues, especially as you kick off your first Facebook advertising cam-
paign with ad copy and the beginning of a/b and multivariate testing. this has all the
elements that demonstrate well—creativity, a reasoned approach to a difficult problem,
a systematic means for collecting relatively unimpeachable feedback from customers,
and data as the final arbiter of any dispute. when social media marketing disintegrates
into people shouting opinions over each other with no data to support their assertions,
everyone is wasting time.
this is probably the right time to sit down with supporters and hecklers alike
to show them what you are doing. think of it as a confidence-building exercise where
you can explain things, answer questions, and, more important, educate folks on the
fact that metrics and success criteria are indeed being watched carefully and that you’re
doing everything you can to make it work.
regardless of what anyone in your company tells you, there is no way of know-
ing what the right answers are in advance. we remember one particular engagement
where the client was convinced that a certain type of image was going to result in a
better outcome, because it had always worked that way before. ads run with these
images actually created new fans at a cost of 3.5 times more than ads run without the
imagery altogether. the clients didn’t believe us until we showed them the statistics!
this is the kind of insight you need—and another prime example of why you need to
experiment. what you think will work and what actually works can be two entirely
different things. Let data be the judge, jury, and executioner.
Week 4: Analyze and Adjust the Campaign
Last week, you spent a lot of time going through the analysis of a particular ad or
series of ads. the great news is that you can “uplevel” all of that work, put ads into
groups, and analyze everything at a campaign level.
Monday: Perform Basic Analysis of a Campaign
to see the full campaign view, go to the Facebook ads and Pages application, or if
you’re still in the individual ads interface, click the back button on your browser or
click the view all ads link on the left side of the screen. You’ll be directed to some-
thing that looks like Figure 6.3—the main interface for the Facebook ad manager.
that screenshot shows the results of campaigns we created across several scenarios.
we used the same ad copy across all five campaigns to compare its effectiveness in the
united states, australia, Canada, and the united kingdom. we also ran a series of dif-
ferent subject-area ads to see how results would differ from more general ads we ran in